Oconee County Council passes ban of Flock cameras countywide

Our Take

Credit to FOX Carolina's Ashley Listrom for getting this on record: an entire county council in South Carolina looked at Flock Safety's pitch and said no thanks, countywide. That's not a small thing. Most of the time these systems get rubber-stamped in a single council meeting with a police chief promising crime-fighting magic and nobody asking who else gets access to the data, how long it's stored, or what happens when it's inevitably misused or breached.

Oconee's move matters because it proves these fights are winnable at the local level, where most people still assume ALPR rollouts are a done deal before residents even hear about them. A county-level ban also short-circuits the usual patchwork problem, where one town bans cameras and the next town over blankets its roads with them, making the whole regional network just as intact. We'd love to see the actual vote count and the reasoning council members gave, but the headline alone is a signal other counties should be paying attention to.

If you want to see whether your own county already has Flock or similar ALPR cameras installed, check our map, and if you'd rather not wait for a viral moment to push back, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting this in front of your own local officials.